How Maryland is Taking Climate Action into Its Own Hands — While Cutting Energy Bills

Last winter, as Marylanders across the state bundled their kids and cranked their thermostats, the heat of their anger stood in stark contrast to the freezing temperatures outside.

Over the past few months, many residents had received increased energy bills, straining households already grappling with rising costs for essentials like food and healthcare. And Marylanders were not alone. Across the country, many Americans are experiencing similar hardships as both energy costs and extreme weather events increase.

Maryland’s new clean energy law offers a promising way forward. Passed earlier this year after Earthjustice teamed up with ticked off residents to advocate for cleaner and more affordable energy, the Next Generation Energy Act protects Maryland ratepayers from paying for unnecessary gas pipelines and utilities’ anti-climate lobbying, all while growing clean energy storage in the state.

Susan Stevens Miller, Senior Attorney, Clean Energy Program. (Matt Roth for Earthjustice)

An Insider’s Advocate

Advancing clean energy progress in this political climate depends on persistence, expertise, and a smart, targeted strategy. To ensure the Next Generation Energy Act offered the best possible outcome for Maryland customers and the climate when it was introduced, it needed an advocate. One who could untangle the elaborate web of cords that is state energy policy while keeping an eye on the broader goal of electrifying the entire country. Earthjustice knew just the right person for the job.

As a former legal advisor to the nation’s top energy regulators, Earthjustice attorney Susan Stevens Miller has seen firsthand how decisionmakers determine how we all power our lives — and whether we do so with clean or dirty energy.

For almost two decades, Miller worked on some of the energy sector’s most complex challenges while serving in the General Counsel’s Office at the Maryland Public Service Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Her job involved everything from keeping energy reliable and affordable to cleaning up messes like the Enron scandal, a massive financial fraud scheme that exposed flaws in how energy companies are regulated.

In the late 1990s, a new challenge arose in the energy world, this time around the public’s growing desire to switch to clean energy to tackle climate change.

Miller was excited about a clean energy transition, but most energy utilities and the agencies who regulated them — including her employers — weren’t on board. Eventually, she left her government job and joined Earthjustice’s new Right To Zero (RTZ) campaign. To transition the nation to clean energy, the campaign targets key venues in individual states known as public utility commissions (PUCs) that are tasked with ensuring energy is safe, reliable, and affordable for the public.

Over the past several years, Earthjustice has worked in PUCs in more than 25 states around the country to lower people’s energy bills and fight climate change.

As one of Earthjustice’s first RTZ hires, it wasn’t long before Miller began shaping energy policy again. Only this time, she’s advocating directly for the people by urging lawmakers to pass laws to strengthen energy regulators’ legal authority to advance clean, affordable energy. At the same time, she’s urging energy regulators to use that authority to force utilities to clean up their power supply. In addition, Miller works with various stakeholders on the Governor’s work group to determine the best path for Maryland to achieve its electric car and truck goals.

“This multi-pronged approach is vital to our success and can be replicated in any state,” says Miller.

Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign and allies held an event in support of the Green Transit, Green Jobs bill at the New York State Capitol on Tuesday, January 30, 2024 . This critical bill will facilitate the transition to electric buses and promote good manufacturing jobs in New York State. (Patrick Dodson for Earthjustice)

A Winning Strategy

While the Trump administration attempts to stymie the country’s clean energy transition and prop up fossil fuels, Earthjustice’s clean energy progress in leading states like Maryland and California provides a blueprint for other states to follow.

In California, where RTZ began in 2017, we continue to rack up legal and legislative wins that are transforming the energy sector and serve as the North Star for our growing zero emissions work across the country. This includes passing legislation to shift California’s energy grid entirely off fossil fuels by 2045, as well as new rules to electrify public transit buses, cars, and boats. Most recently, we pushed California to pass groundbreaking legislation that will lower utility bills for customers and help the state plan for an electric future for homes and buildings.

Elsewhere around the country, we’re fighting the gas industry and pushing states to supercharge their own clean energy transitions. In New York, for example, we’re utilizing the state’s cutting-edge climate law to protect a New York City policy that cleans up climate pollution by electrifying large buildings. In Colorado, we helped push the state’s utility giant Xcel Energy to commit to spending over $252 million over the next four years on beneficial electrification programs through its first-ever Clean Heat Plan. And in Pennsylvania, an energy utility company will build the state’s largest solar project to date as part of a settlement reached with Earthjustice.

Building on this success, Earthjustice’s Midwest office launched its RTZ campaign in 2025 and is focusing first on advancing clean transportation in Illinois. Our work has included supporting advocacy for the state to adopt emissions standards that drive vehicle electrification and efforts to curb air pollution from freight activity.

“There’s never been a more pressing time for cities and states to step up to the plate and protect their health, their air quality, and their future, says Adrian Martinez, director of Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign. “Our campaign was built for this moment, and we are eager for the work ahead of us.”

Affordable Energy for All

One of the keys to successfully pushing for clean energy policies across the country and in different political climates, says Martinez, is to ensure that clean energy is affordable, particularly as U.S. electricity prices continue to outpace inflation. Affordable electricity is especially necessary for households as families adopt zero-emissions vehicles and electric appliances like heat pumps.

That’s why a big part of Earthjustice’s Right To Zero work includes challenging utilities that want to keep states stuck in the past. Nationwide, the industry’s tactics include everything from hiring paid actors to speak against local clean air measures to creating pro-gas children’s booklets to hand out to kids in schools. Some utilities have even been caught spending millions of dollars per year in ratepayer funds (i.e. the money you spend on your energy bill) to lobby against anti-climate policies, build out and make unnecessary repairs to gas infrastructure, and fund luxury lifestyle expenses like private jet travel for executives.

Just this past March in Maryland, state energy regulators found that the energy company Washington Gas Light misled its customers by sending out tens of thousands of bills that included deceptive advertising claiming that gas is “clean energy” that saves trees and is cheaper than electricity. Earthjustice joined a deceptive advertising complaint that was initially filed by the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, a state agency responsible for representing residential utility customers.

“Earthjustice’s detailed legal analysis shed light on all the ways that WGL’s advertising that gas is ‘clean’ was factually wrong,” says David Lapp of the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel. “Between energy customer interests and environmental interests, there’s just so much alignment there,” he adds. “We’re always happy to have Earthjustice on our side.”

As U.S. households continue to be crushed under the weight of skyrocketing energy bills, Earthjustice will continue to challenge the fossil fuel industry’s longstanding efforts to push its deadly and costly products onto the American public.

In California, for example, we’re currently advocating for the passage of a ratepayer protection act that will hold for-profit utilities accountable when they slip the cost of political lobbying, pricey public relations advertising, or shareholder-related expenses like travel on private jets into customers’ bills. And in Oregon, we’ve successfully pushed the state’s utility regulators to phase out gas line extension subsidies and demanded more transparency to ensure customers aren’t charged for anti-climate lobbying.

“The public shouldn’t be paying for anti-climate lobbying and gas boondoggles,” says Martinez. “The only way forward is to electrify everything and get off dirty fossil fuels. That’s how we build an energy future that works for everyone.”